For Want of a Nail
by SplatDragon
Summary: Blackfoot's mother liked to say she was 'intuitive'. And that wasn't a good thing. Wolves aren't 'intuitive', they think. They think hard, perhaps too hard, and too much. Blackfoot's instincts guided her, seldom led her wrong. But to wolves, listening just to your instincts just isn't done. Yet, when she saw the man in the snowstorm, slumped over his horse, she couldn't walk away.
1. A Gut Feeling

Blackfoot liked to think she was a smart wolf.

If you asked the other wolves, they'd disagree.

She was smart, there was no denying it. But 'smart' in a wolf is far different from 'smart' in a human.

Her mother often said she was 'intuitive'. But she didn't mean that in a good way. Wolves shouldn't _be_ intuitive. They need to think: will hunting this rabbit that ran in front of my nose be worth the energy? Will sneaking into that camp I found for the food be worth the danger?

But Blackfoot didn't think. It was second nature of her to take in everything at once and, instead of pausing to think, she would make her decision and barrel in. Usually, she was right. But for wolves, that just wasn't done.

To the other wolves, she was all around strange.

Where they avoided humans, found them alien and strange, only to be interacted with when they were defending themselves, she found them fascinating. More than once, she'd been thrashed after she'd been found trailing a traveling human that she'd found wandering the Grizzlies, and her pack had thrashed her she-didn't-know-how-many times after finding her sitting near a camp, eyes wide in wonder, staring at the humans, watching their fire, trying to listen to their nonsensical babble.

But as Snowfall wore on, long after Rainfall should have started, the pack stopped finding the time to harass her. And she stopped having time to indulge in her fascination. Prey was becoming harder and harder to find, and snowstorms were more and more common. Her pack, one of the few made up of several family groups, was beginning to split. Some of them were of the opinion that they should start hunting the humans that came into their mountains, while the other half was firmly against it. While the other packs would go after the humans, they'd seen the decimation the humans could bring to them.

A particularly bad moon-cycle, bad tempers fueled by empty stomachs and a seemingly unending snowstorm, had finally split the pack. Those who wanted to hunt the humans had gone their own way, while those who were against it had gone another, relationships and family-bonds fractured and destroyed.

Blackfoot had gone off on her own, powered by the thought that the packs would think that she had gone with the other.

She followed the river, a path she had taken countless times, seeking fish that swam beneath thin ice, mice or voles that skittered beneath the snow, or a jackrabbit that hid in its burrow. Her stomach grumbled, and she was _hungry_, but her newfound freedom had her stepping high, full of energy and glee, no longer feeling weighed down by the rules of her birthpack.

The young she-wolf didn't know how far she had traveled when she saw the human.

The winds had kicked up, so heavy she had to lean into them, snow thick in the air. She had to squint to see, but she'd traveled and hunted in this sort of weather so much recently that she'd become nearly numb to it, and a familiar excitement filled her at the sight of a human, slouched low on a dark horse, a ball of flame high in the air.

Oh, _oh_, surely this had to be a sign? Not even a day after she'd set out on her own, and she'd found a human!

And humans always had camps when they came to their mountains, so if she just followed him then she could fill her stomach. Or not. It all depended on her 'intuition'.

But as he neared, there was a jolt in her stomach, as though someone had put a hook into her ribs and _pulled_. She didn't know why, but she _needed_ to follow him. If she didn't, and why wouldn't she?, something very bad would happen. It was like all those other times her 'intuition' had told her to do something, had told her yes, go into camp, get the food, or no, _no_, don't eat that, something's wrong with it, run away, but far, far stronger.

So, careful to keep a safe distance between her and him, not wanting to be noticed, although sure he would have a hard time seeing her in this weather (in her time studying humans or, as her pack had called it, 'gawping stupidly at them', she had noticed that their senses were _awful_, and even more so when it was snowing), she began to lope after him, setting her paws in his horse's tracks.


	2. Before the Fall

The man rode, and he rode, and he rode. So she ran, and she ran, and she ran, even as the storm grew so thick she couldn't see her nose in front of her face, could only follow him through the tracks of his horse, her paws falling into the tracks naturally. If she tricked herself, she could think it was like any other time she followed her pack, single file, trying to hide their numbers.

Finally, though, the storm seemed too much for even him. And she had to give it to him—he'd lasted longer than any human she'd seen before. She'd followed humans before, out of boredom and out of curiosity, but never out of this painful intuition, and they always set up camp not long after the snow kicked up. But he'd kept going, and kept going, long enough that even she grew tired, felt that her paws had gone numb and felt as though they would fall off. (She'd seen it happen to a dumb young wolf, once, who'd insisted on crossing a stream in the cold. It was sheer dumb luck that he'd survived, and he'd been called Onepaw since. Personally, she felt his name should have been Threepaw, but no one asked what she thought. No one ever did.)

The ball of flame rose higher, and how she wanted to get closer! How they tamed the sun, she'd never know, but she'd learned long ago that while it bit hot, it radiated warmth, and there was nothing nicer than to curl up beside it and let it soak your fur. So long as you didn't get too close, didn't provoke it, it wouldn't bite at you with its sharp, sharp fangs.

Then it dropped suddenly, and she approached cautiously, not wanting to be seen. While her dark pelt helped hide her during the night, broke up her frame in the shadows, it did little to disguise her in snow, to break up her figure when snow was whipping around such that you could only see outlines. Approaching, she saw that he was crouching under a small overhang, little more than a stretch of rock that stuck out a bit more than the rest, not even high enough off the snow to clear the horse's shoulder.

She tilted her head, moving to approach, but the horse's ears perked, and it turned to look at her, or at least in her direction, making that low throaty noise that showed its discomfort. The man stopped in his work, reaching for his gun, and she backed away, sitting and contenting herself with watching from a distance. She didn't quite know what he was doing, but within a few minutes he was sitting beside a large ball of flame, the horse standing as close as it could get, and she drank in the sight, wishing she could get closer, not willing to for fear of alarming the horse and alerting the man.

She never could understand humans, though she wished dearly that she could. How they tamed the sun, how they got horses to obey them instead of flee in terror… she wished that she could, that she could move her paws, grasp things as they could. But she couldn't, and knew that she never would, and so satisfied herself with watching.

The man was… well, she wasn't quite sure what he was doing. He had his gun in his lap (and she knew the word gun, any wolf old enough to have their eyes open and ears unsealed did), and was dragging something over it, that funny muzzle of his screwed downwards as he grumbled, the words torn away by the wind that howled with a fury greater than even the angriest pack, and she only caught glimpses of his dark brown eyes, occasionally squinting towards her.

Before long, though, he set the gun away, and she let herself relax, some. It wasn't the kind of gun that men tended to turn towards her kind, but she knew to be wary of anything that smelled of gunpowder or looked of a gun. He pulled something out of that weird thing that men carried on their horses and on their hips that let them carry things, that she desperately wished to have so that she could carry more than just a rabbit to cache, but she'd discovered that you needed _thumbs_, cursed _thumbs_ to use them, and brought it to his mouth. She licked her lips when he shoved it down his throat—she'd forgotten how hungry she was, oh, even his horse looked good, and horses were her least favorite food—laying on her stomach with a whine. Not unlike a pleading dog, she flattened her ears and rested her head on her paws, licking her lips and feeling oddly disappointed when he finished eating, leaning back against the rock and lowering the whatever-it-was on his head down over his eyes.

Before long, he was asleep.

She was quick to follow him.

Not even hours later, she woke to wolves howling.


End file.
